Beyond the End: An Editor's Note

It’s easy to read through End and think, “These are small-town issues that are important to those who live here but lack meaning to those who don’t.” And that’s half true. What you are about to read in End Issue 2 is important to those who live here — but these themes reverberate well beyond the Shinnecock Canal. What we intend to do here at End is use small-town stories to talk about much larger issues. Take for example our feature on wastewater treatment across the East End. A lack of public infrastructure and sufficient planning has resulted in a crisis that needs to be urgently addressed. A lack of foresight in infrastructure has also bedeviled New York City’s subways, Flint’s drinking water, and tons of other public necessities nationwide.

On a less environmentally serious note, but nonetheless a culturally important one, we explore how Modernist architectural masterpieces by one of the best known architects of the Hamptons are being lost. The same can be said about 20th century architecture across the country that is deemed too new to deserve preservation. Anyone who’s ever taken the Long Island Rail Road to Penn Station and seen the pictures of the original McKim, Mead, and White terminal on the platform walls (a sick joke, if you ask me) knows the consequences of demolishing great architecture.

The next issue of End comes out on July 12, and in it we will explore how changes in the East End’s retail scene reflect national trends and how climate change, a global issue, will affect our coastal community. The small size of our East End community helps to simplify what in many places are super complicated issues. (Sometime try to figure out where waste from a Manhattan apartment eventually ends up.) By keeping complicated issues simple, End seeks to connect the East End to a much larger community.